Join us on October 6th at 12 pm Pacific Time for our first in-person Sawchen lecture of 2023 – 2024 featuring Brian Baer from Ken State’s Department of Department of Modern & Classical Language Studies.
Title: “De-colonizing Slavic Studies: Revisionist History and Critical Reading Practices”
Abstract: This paper proposes translation as an approach to decolonizing Slavic Studies. As the repressed other of the monolingual nation-state, translation holds the potential to critically interrogate the ontology of the modern world order, which in Naoki Sakai’s terms, assumes a monolingual addressee. Through close readings of translation discourse, actual translations and works of transfiction—that is, fictional works portraying translators and translations—this paper outlines a set of critical reading practices through which to interrogate the political unconscious of the Russian, then Soviet empires.
Bio: Brian James Baer is Professor of Russian and Translation Studies at Kent State University. He is founding editor of the journal Translation and Interpreting Studies and co-editor of the book series Literatures, Cultures, Translation (Bloomsbury), with Michelle Woods, and Translation Studies in Translation (Routledge), with Yifan Zhu. His recent publications include the monograph Queer Theory and Translation Studies: Language, Politics, Desire and the collected volume Teaching Literature in Translation: Pedagogical Contexts and Reading Practices, with Michelle Woods. His most recent translations include Culture, Memory and History: Essays in Cultural Semiotics, by Juri Lotman, Introduction to Translation Theory, by Andrei Fedorov, Red Crosses by Sasha Filipenko, and Not Russian, by Mikhail Shevelev. He is a member of the advisory board of the Mona Baker Centre for Translation Studies, in Shanghai, China, and of the Nida Center for Advanced Research on Translation, in Rimini, Italy. He is the current president of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association.
Watch Brian Baer’s Lecture Online:
Missed Brian Baer’s lecture on October 6th? You can access the video and audio recording on UBC’s cIRcle database.
